Xero making the move from back office to front office with the release of its new products

Xero CEO Rod Drury onstage at the announcement. Photo / Aimee Shaw

Accounting software maker Xero is making the move from back office to front office with the release of a new range of products.

Xero chief executive and founder Rod Drury today made the announcement at the company's annual Asia-Pacific region conference, Xerocon, held in Melbourne.

The new products; Xero HQ, Xero Expenses, Xero Discuss, Xero Projects and Xero Lifelong Learning Platform have been developed to make operations easier for small businesses, accountants and bookkeepers, running alongside its accounting software.

Drury said he was proud to deliver new tools to drive further productivity.

"We've made our money from selling one thing to a million small businesses and what we're doing now is releasing products that get us from the back office to the front office, to the employees of small businesses," Drury said.

The new products will cover the management of projects, expenses, education and payroll.

"Our real focus is helping small businesses grow and export.

"We're arming our accountants and bookkeepers to become growth consultants, giving them strategies, connecting them with bankers, so that we can get capital into small business so that each small business creates one new job."

Xero chief executive and founder Rod Drury said he believed Xero had the potential to become the Amazon of the small business world. Photo / Aimee Shaw

Drury said he believed Xero had the potential to become the Amazon of the small business world.

"If you think about market sizes, consumers are the biggest market size in the world, the Facebook, the YouTube, the Twitters, the next biggest market must be all small businesses and we know that accounting software is a key system of record so someone needs to be that small business platform, like what Facebook is to the consumer, and we want Xero to be that for small business," he said.

"So far we are the leading international business platform."

Xero has also opened up its practice platform, partnering up with nine technology providers to create solutions for accountants.

Education platform Xero Lifelong Learning platform was developed to make upskilling easier.

"We've now solved the problem of how young people or people retraining, or reskilling, how they learn all of these new business skills," Drury said. "It's a really neat educational tool."

Drury said he believed "a key part of Xero's success is having the capital to do things properly."

"We've raised over $400 million and reinvested our profits back into the business. We've actually put over a billion of capital to build this global platform and our channels, so we're in a really, really strong position."

The company is in the early stages of using artificial intelligence to enhance its technology, but will continue to do so, Drury said.

"It's a super exciting time and in 10 years to disrupt the market so quickly and still have so much room to grow is pretty exciting."

In March this year Xero surpassed one million subscribers worldwide, with a total of one third of all New Zealand small businesses using its software.

In less than two years it has doubled its subscriber count and added close to 300,000 new subscribers in the past year alone.

There are more than 3,000 people attending Xerocon Melbourne, from a total of 19 countries.

Aimee Shaw travelled to Melbourne courtesy of Xero.